OLD HARPIES SCOLDING YOUNG WOMENFOR NOT VOTING ON THE BASIS OF GENDER;JOHN KASICH NAMED ON “MORNING JOE”

As the New Hampshire primary proceeded I hopped from channel to channel thinking about a name that had not been spoken in months, a crucial name for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: Elizabeth Warren.

It was apparently unpronounceable by talking heads, or unspeakable, or unauthorized, and never came up.

As elderly feminist endorsements flowed for Mrs. Clinton, I imagined the lot of them being brushed aside by the shining spotless escutcheon of our 21st century Ms. Galahad, whose strength is as the strength of 10 because her heart is pure: Elizabeth Warren, a/k/a The Sphinx.

Who, as a woman active in today’s politics, ranks those old harpies who are busy scolding young women for not voting on the basis of gender.

Yes — they really seemed to think that was a key issue; not Goldman Sachs and Wall Street, not the idiotic insecure private email server, not Clinton’s failed hawk tenure as Secretary of State, not her vote for the cockamamie corporate invasion of Iraq that split Sunni and Shia to create ISIS. (Don’t believe it? Read Joby Warrick’s Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS).

Not even Victoria Nuland’s regime-change blunder in Ukraine that severely disrupted the European Union’s working trade and energy ties with Russia, created an ethnic civil war, and elevated Putin’s status everywhere but here.No matter, they are Female Fogeys For Clinton, while Warren is a woman with a name that is apparently unmentionable, never to soil the tongue of major media people, or even minor ones. But hey, it’s only a presidency.

What did Warren think about the Sanders phenomenon? God only knows, and He/She/It ain’t talk’n any more than Warren is.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich surprised everyone by placing 2nd in the New Hampshire primary.

As I tripped the light fantastic from channel to channel, another unpronounceable/unspeak-able name came into focus for me, if not the media.

This not-to-be-mentioned governor of a huge swing state has a most peculiar record: effective budget-balancer on the national level who seemed to forget he was a Republican and collaborate with the enemy across the aisle.

Then this mystery man became a governor, with an awkward Democratic legislature in difficult economic times. Somehow he did his across-the-aisle thing, and damned if he didn’t get re-elected, balance the Ohio budget, and create a lot of those jobs that other wannabe candidates keep talking about in the abstract.

Three big sins: fracking, telling the truth in an everyday kind of voice, and not much money.So okay, he can govern, but so what? Like it’s Showtime, baby, and the media are reveling in it. Giddy, loving their master, Candidate Trump, and sparing him the expense of advertising by covering his every regular-guy-billionaire belch.

Does Donald Trump own “Morning Joe”? Big majority interest.

Only thoughtful old-school thinking-man’s guy Willie Geist would utter Gov. Kasich’s unspeakable name, but it was lost in the general flow as Joe Scarborough and Mika-the-Chic Brzezinski praised themselves for being in the Trump vanguard. (Not as allies, of course, very unseemly, but pretty breathless just the same.)

Jersey Boy Chris Christie, smarter than them, saw Kasich coming and formed an alliance with a billionaire hedge-fund crook to head Kasich off at the gap.

Weren’t no use. New Hampshire had a long look at the invisible Governor Kasich, and it didn’t work. They liked him real well.

Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” Mika’s the one on the table; her father was an adviser to Jimmy Carter.

Unlike Warren, Kasich took a chance. With a damn slim purse, he took on the magical Big Names — Bush, Rubio and Christie — and cleaned their clocks. Clearly impossible, and it took many hours for the talking heads’ master to permit his name to be spoken. In a demeaning way — after all, the man has no money.

Finally the Republican Party saw him from the mire of well-financed mediocrity, with his proven ability to govern and probably deliver a most crucial swing-state, right? And took him into their hearts, right?

Wrong! Like the media, they are that slow, that dumb, that much in thrall to glamour and money and branding, and everything else that has failed them.Perhaps they suspect Kasich may not be for sale, which is not ever okay. Perhaps they can’t pronounce his name.

Reince Priebus — your name may or may not be pronounceable — Where are you now? Out having lunch with Debbie Wasserman Schultz?

American Exceptionalism has an appealing patriotic buzz, though we owe the phrase to Josef Stalin, who was exasperated by American communists and their assumption of special rights and privileges. Manifest Destiny was the 19th century equivalent,and was created by a journalist to support war with Mexico. Both phrases are aggressive statements of American power implying special rules. Statesmen from John Quincy Adams to Abraham Lincoln questioned Manifest Destiny, but it had a primal patriotic appeal – We’re Number One! It caught on.

Today it reminds me of something we used to sing while drinking in college, to the tune of Auld Lang Syne:

We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

We don’t talk or write much about it, but the U.S. is unique in one very significant way: we command a huge land mass rich in resources and are unchallenged north or south. That creates a totally different situation from that of European nations, packed cheek by jowl with neighbors to challenge and correct each other. Our regional dominance is asserted in the Monroe Doctrine, which was never seriously challenged until ﻿Fidel Castro﻿ threw out Batista and the Mafia in 1959, and hooked up with Nikita Khrushchev. Our bicontinental dominance also creates a dangerous psychology, a sense of being unique and invulnerable, destined to prevail. It is a classic NIMBY statement, and is not seen as being reciprocal: when Khrushchev came to Cuba, Eisenhower and Kennedy were enraged, and out of that came the Bay of Pigs. But when Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian Affairs toppled the Ukrainian government and Putin reacted as we did with Cuba, we saw this as Russian aggression. No NIMBY for Russia.

Like Adams and Lincoln, Kennedy had reservations about unbridled use of U.S. power, and was backchanneling with Castro when he was killed in Dallas. He was by nature, education and social background, a global thinker, and like Lincoln and FDR he did not fear to include political enemies in his inner circle. (He also overruled the most senior of them, Dean Acheson, in the Cuban Missile Crisis.) American Exceptionalism was not a current phrase at the time, but Kennedy’s take on its inherent arrogance is indicated by his rejection of the Dulles Brothers absolute worst decision ever, which was to ignore popular sentiment in Vietnam. Kennedy had an ear not only for the American people, but other peoples as well. He knew and did not ignore the fact that Ho Chi Minh would win an election. As a book reviewer circa 1990, I was startled to learn that in memos and directives at the time of his death, JFK was bucking senior advisors and turning away from deeper involvement in Vietnam. American Exceptionalists of the time (which is to say, corporate movers and shakers who stood to profit) spoke of Vietnam as a domino that could fall and bring down an endless line, with communism taking over. And WTF could those little brown third world buggers do about it when we loosed the world’s greatest-ever war machine on them with their AK 47s and handfuls of rice?

We know now. But American Exceptionalists, i.e. Neocons, avoid admission of this single greatest American error of that century, and the Big Picture it clearly suggests.

The Big Picture is that Manifest Destiny/American Exceptionalism are wines that did not travel well. Despite deposing the elected government of Iran in the 1950s, and the CIA coup in Chile which installed Augusto Pinochet, and our general plundering of Latin America – despite all this, our reputation and prestige were intact before Vietnam, because the USSR was doing equally ugly things. They were not restored under Bush 41 and Bill Clinton, but there was progress and restraint. Bush was satisfied to cripple Iraq without destroying it. Clinton somehow found a way through the Serb/Croat horror without expanding it, and in his time the nightmare of Northern Ireland was set on a course to end the killing. Imperfect solutions, but in the end creditable.

There was a great existential lesson in Vietnam, but the myth of American Exceptionalism stopped us from learning it. Germany learned from WW2, which rolled through their homeland; we learned nothing from Vietnam, which was on the other side of the globe. Most importantly, we failed to learn is that we’re not as exceptional or omnipotent as we like to think, but part of humanity, exceptional mainly in our origin and geographic luck. The founding fathers did not think of us as fundamentally superior to other peoples – there is humility as well as pride in our great documents and letters of that time, an egalitarian spirit we are losing in this century.Another lesson yet to be learned is that imposing ourselves and our culture on other peoples runs into the same problem that George III ran into here: people will fight amazingly hard, beyond reason, for the ground they live on. Starving, they will still fight, as we fought. They will make themselves into human bombs when all else fails. And they will not respect those who fail to conquer them.

And they will ignore us, as is happening in the Middle East. Rather than exceptional, we were proved fallible, again defeated, and are ignored. There’s nothing exceptional about what happened there except the profits reaped from that war by corporate Exceptionalists. The three trillion dollars lost in Iraq and our eighty military bases worldwide do not make us exceptional in any good way; they make us feared and disliked. And Putin’s reaction to Ukraine has elevated him to another level of respect. His expeditious limited use of force near his borders is seen as statesmanlike.

American Exceptionalism has become presidential bluster, and nothing will really change until we rid ourselves of this silly and dangerous notion that we are different from and better than the rest of humanity. All nations are exceptional in that they have their own unique cultures. People envy what used to be our general economic well-being, but the liking and respect that existed half a century ago have been dissipated by the cost and psychology of the war machine created by this notion of American Exceptionalism.

SCIENCE ÜBER ALLES – we know this from Team Sky and their talkative spokespeople. But at my most delusional I can’t imagine spending ten times the cost of a stock 1980 racing bike for a pair of wheels. Neither can some kid trying to ride his way off the farm. $300 for those bikes, Italian, full Campagnolo (state-of-art at the time), double-butted Columbus tubes. You can probably find one in a museum.

A man named Gruenwedel sent me a note the other day about my chronicle of an early US foray to Italy. What used to be the US Cycling Federation had managed to scrape a few thousand dollars together in 1978 (as I recall) to send a team to Europe, with Mike Neel managing, and starring George Mount, hero of the Montreal Olympics. The Italians loved Neel, which was a very good thing, because the team ran out of money after about ten days. The Italian generosity was unbelievable, and these were not rich people. I was attached to the team to write about it, and was regarded as potentially expendable because the money going for my room and board was another expense. Neel calmed that down.

We stayed at the Bar Augusto d’Alme at a reduced rate negotiated by Neel. It rained most of the time, but funny things happened, starting with a foreshadowing of the ’84 Olympic blood doping. When the Polish team arrived, they made jokes about Eddie Borysewicz, whom they said was a junior coach who’d been fired for “chemicals,” an area where the eastern bloc teams were in the vanguard and notorious.

Chilly and wet, unhappy middle-class American kids who didn’t speak the language (Neel had ridden there as a pro and was fluent.) Many silly questions at dinner, which Neel would answer twice, and then say “figure it out.” That calculation took a while in some cases. Physically, the team was strong, but the racing confused them at first. Faster tighter gruppo and decisive unexpected moves by riders they couldn’t evaluate. So, no results. After a long-winded excuse for yet another tactical snafu, there was a little silence.

“Resultati,” said Neel decisively. He wasn’t a big talker, except with Italians when we needed credit or a favor, which was often. When he asked how much money I could lay hands on, I realized what he was dealing with. The Bergamo skies remained gray and we remained at the Bar Augusto getting no results and waiting for the Settimana Bergamasca, a big local stage race.

I will remember that race to the grave, because I learned a lot that week: France has the Tour, the low countries have those nightmare classics and guys who can handle them, but Italy has the love. I saw it every day as they did us favors, loaned us cars, filled their tanks, and discounted everything. They were totally knocked out at having actual Americans there. American bike racers – who knew?

The night before the Bergamasca race there was an emergency involving a long-distance drive our team cars just weren’t up to. A local tifosi loaned us his new Lancia. Neel drove the Autostrada all night and I tried to figure out exactly what 160K meant in miles per hour.

I covered that race in various vehicles, always with some Italian making sure I got a ride that would let me see the race. The best rides were on motors and in the lead car, a tiny red convertible. A happy vehicle. I was amazed at how cool and relaxed the driver and race chief were. Absolutely no resemblance to punitive tightass US personnel drunk on power.

On the best day Mount got away in a break, and just as I was feeling it there was an emergency: One minute we were cruising, the next minute the little red car stopped dead. The driver was under the hood instantly, the race chief under the dash, and they were shouting at each other, still in a great mood, confident, sure the car would start, actually laughing.

And the car did start, just as the race was overtaking us, close enough that I could spot Mount’s red white and blue jersey at the front, taking a pull, strong as a horse. We roared off and life was absolutely perfect, couldn’t be improved.

But it was. Ten or twelve minutes later a motorcycle pulled alongside and the driver shouted at me in Italian. I didn’t get it, and he made gestures. Then he reached into a sack hanging over his shoulder and started tossing me tiny bottles of grappa, one each. We opened them and toasted him and/or the cycling gods, and tossed down the grappa. It was totally un-American, never happen here, an experience beyond great. Sublime.

To be followed by the miracle of the wines – Mount and Mark Pringle finishing first and second at Bassano di Grappa, for which we we won an industrial size case of wine, with which Neel paid a very happy Augusto. Followed by more success and more cases of wine, which took up a lot of space in the team car.

So while I’m impressed with what science has done to the bicycle and the sport, I recall the Bergamasca and what followed the same way I remember my college girlfriend finally saying yes.

Friends ask why did I write about horse racing (my novel Breeders) when I spent years racing bicycles and writing about it?

Mainly because thoroughbred racing is rich and glitzy, full of horse whisperers and dripping with money. Old money, new money, exotic foreign money, all conveniently gathered in colorful venues from Saratoga to Pimlico to Santa Anita. Whereas until recently, cycling was a low profile blue collar sport with one media showpiece, the three week Tour de France. Like the World Sauna Championships, it had a limited audience until scandal struck – death by sauna in one case, Lance Armstrong in the other.

Cycling is complicated. All sports are more complicated than they look, but road racing is extra complicated.

It also takes time. We’re the instant gratification nation, and think a two hour marathon is long. That’s less than half a typical road race, and the Grand Tours last longer than a grand slam tennis tournament. They’re like symphonies – three movements, a week apiece, five or six hours a day. Europe loves symphonies, but we go metal, pop or indie.

Sports are complicated in different ways. Road racing is a team sport, but it’s unpredictable and stuff happens. Sometimes it’s comic. In the 2013 World Championships, two top Spanish riders got away with Portuguese Rui Costa. When he took off, the Spaniards couldn’t work together and soon Portugal had its first World Road Champion. A few years ago Sky’s Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome got into a celebrated Tour de France kerfuffle when Wiggins was leading and looked like he was running out of gas. Froome, a talented young serf in his service, decided to go for it on his own. He was brought up short, but did eventually take over the team. But the move defined him as a talkative and controversial diva, addicted to cameras and microphones.

These team explosions can be historic. Back in the day, playboy Fausto Coppi decided to let team leader Gino Bartali (known as The Pious, loved by the peasants) untangle himself from a crash on his own, and went for it himself, successfully. Big stink team meeting. But the well-named Fausto was on his way, a fearless secular guy who invited his married girlfriend to dine with the team, scandalizing Italy and creating his own more modern fan base. And back in the eighties, the legendary Bernard Hinault double-crossed Greg LeMond in the 1985 Tour. LeMond went on to clean his celebrated French clock the following year in the race Hinault thought he owned. Young Alberto Contador laughing off teammate Armstrong’s comeback in 2007 was along the same lines. Europeans laughed with him – Armstrong was an open secret, hated in the peloton.

So – a team sport that can get loose under stress. And confusing. Just to begin with there are all those teams, as many as twenty in a big race. It’s not mano-a-mano like boxing or tennis (though it often comes down to that toward the end), and it’s not one team against another like soccer or football. It’s a bunch of competing outfits jostling each other like nations or corporations.

Further to confuse casual viewers, there are the many Grand Tour prizes. Overall winner (aka GC) is the one in the headlines, but an individual stage win is huge. A stage win by a lesser or younger rider is a career changer – headlines, interviews, instant respect and a better contract for the next year, because riders bargain individually with teams, and a Tour (or Giro d’Italia or Vuelta a España) stage win is a trump card.

It goes on. There are winners jerseys for the best sprinter, best neophyte, and King of the Mountains, all valuable in contract negotiation. With all these teams and prizes, cycling begins to resemble real life. And just like in real life, favors are exchanged. Quick chats on the road: “I will not attack your candidate for GC victory if you let me have this stage win,” or “I won’t fight you for the King of the Mountains if you don’t attack me in tomorrow’s stage.” And so forth. Is it dirty? Well, on a rainy day you’re covered with mud and freezing and you’ve got road rash from going down. Tomorrow you’re climbing the Pyrenees guzzling water in heat that melts the road tar.

It’s not cricket for sure, but it may be the most perfect reflection of real life to be found in sports. I loved it. I loved racing and working with teams and following the Grand Tours and writing about them. I made just enough to live on, and usually wrote for a small group of people who often understood it better than I did. As in real life, journalists are always a step behind.

I wrote about horse racing because it was so American, and because I had a smattering of knowledge about it, and because people understand it, or think they do. Most races are about two minutes of very exciting seriously dangerous half-calculated life-threatening insanity. Being super-white, it was also the perfect platform for an indirect dialog on race, which no one reading the book seemed to notice, because the hero wasn’t a rich punk rapper or celeb.

Most of all though, it was that money. Thoroughbred racing is saturated with money, which is universally loved and understood. Lance Armstrong was the first big-money guy in bike racing, and he’s nothing compared with any old oil Sheikh who can spend half a million on the possibilities of some fragile inbred creature that may break down in the first month of training.

Bike racing is low profile, low rent, tough as nails, and patient. Zero glitz, and so complicated that I’d have needed footnotes just to explain, say, why Guido let Ian go on up the road and waited for Mike and Pyotr. You can’t do footnotes in a novel.

If you watch TV, you know that there have been more than a few teenage football deaths this year. Eight and counting. One kid collapsed after scoring a touchdown, two died of heatstroke in practice. Some parents seem to accept the game as a sacred rite of passage, and one fatalistic coach guessed football was still safer than high school drivers. But this much is for sure – across the nation, for white and black people, football has totemic status. And of course there’s huge money involved. When those black Missouri players revolted against repeated racial slurs by going on strike, they got the president of the University fired. Quick. The next game was worth a million dollars, give or take.

I loved football. I was a slow, overweight, interior lineman and benchwarmer, but my proudest high school moment was bursting into the opposing backfield and running head-on into the other team’s halfback, a big guy with a full head of steam. I didn’t know spit from Shinola after that play and was taken out, probably cross-eyed, but everyone was real pleased with me. Their halfback stayed in but he wasn’t himself, and it was noted. Respect at last, and boy, did I crave it.

Sport is primal species behavior, hugely cross cultural. It ignores all kinds of boundaries because it’s rooted deep in our instincts. We think about ancient Greece as the cradle of democracy and European culture – great playwrights, brilliant science, source of modern philosophy, Homer, unforgettable sculpture, etc. But those brilliant precursors of western thought were frosting on the cake of Greek culture. A greater hero was Phidippides dropping dead after his twenty-six mile run to tell of victory over the Persian hordes. REJOICE, WE CONQUER!

Sport (and war) was at the very center of Greek culture, and the Olympics were an apotheosis. As important as football is to us, the Games were more important to the Greeks, religious events, recognized as such. We love the idea of those Olympics without knowing much about them: no-slaves-allowed, gender chauvinism, you-name-it sexuality, and near-absolute brutality. Strangling, choking and finger-breaking were part of wrestling, and boxing could go to the death if a guy wouldn’t quit. The champions were revered more than Tom Brady and Larry Bird in Boston. Olympic victors had ultimate status and respect, beyond Sophocles, Socrates, Aristotle and anyone else. Win your event and retire – live on the state, do as you will, young boys, whatever. You’d never find Joe Louis working as a casino greeter.

One big difference: the Greeks didn’t have today’s big-money sports, and what comes with them. Any serious teen athlete knows what’s going on. PEDs trickled down to college, and then to high school. Teen athletes know all about them, and where to get them. And because they feel incomplete without victory, quite a few kids will die from drugs – slowly from long-term effects, and suddenly, as with these eight dead boys. Because training and drugs change everything big time. When I ran head-on into that flying halfback at sixteen, I was a slow, overweight and untrained, a true amateur. That same collision between drugged-up kids who work out every day is way faster and harder and much more dangerous.

I don’t have to think about it anymore, but if I did, I’d discourage my son from playing football. Getting my head knocked half off and saving a touchdown is a great memory, but if it happened enough times I might not have much memory at all, just an ongoing depressed suicidal bad mood that would poison my life and the lives of those close to me.

In the classic 1960s movie, a captured American soldier is programmed by commies to kill, and released into U.S .politics to do the job.

The odds for Dr. Ben Carson being a Manchurian Candidate sent to destroy his party are better than those for POTUS being a closet Muslim with a forged birth certificate. Obama is all too predictable, but Carson is startling and hypnotic, as unique in his Christian humility as Trump is with those snide one liners. In their quiet mealy-mouthed way, Carson's statements are amazing and disquieting.

Liberals are howling like coyotes, and staunch Republican Morning Joe Scarborough bluntly told him to stop embarrassing himself. It’s not stopping: the Wall Street Journal has unearthed more questionable tales, one about saving white students from black rage after the King assassination, another about getting his picture in the paper at Yale for his remarkable honesty in connection with a psychology test.

There may be legitimate confusion about Carson’s imaginary scholarship to West Point and the chat with General William Westmoreland that could not have happened, and it’s very arguable that marijuana can do bad things to the immature brain.

But even Ben Carson’s “science” is off the wall.

Evolution is anathema to the party base, a potent rallying cry to the religious right that we expect to see from, say, Mike Huckabee. But not an educated man with a scientific background, because evolution is part of basic medical training, and that’s widely known fact.

And that granary kerfuffle. The notion of the pyramids being granaries is so uninformed, so totally at odds with widely known fact, that his statement is troubling. Smart junior high kids know better. And it goes on: the notion of tithing has appeal to his base, but it’s silly enough to make those other dodgy tax "plans" look reasonable. On this serious and complicated issue, Carson showed no sign of having done any research at all. When challenged he started throwing numbers around off the top of his head, as if a trillion here or there was nothing to get excited about. He doesn’t get excited. Except about his mysterious youth. CNN's investigation of his tale of childhood violence and attempted murder was done professionally. Not definitive, but pretty clear, and it wasn’t Swiftboating – they talked to people who’d known him, not political enemies or bought-and-paid for witnesses. It was a routine obligatory procedure, reasonable journalism.

Dr. Carson went bonkers and attacked CNN at length, because none of his childhood acquaintances could remember anything but a shy kid with glasses. Then he said those acquaintances weren’t around at the time, which they were. It was embarrassing: Carson fantasized and CNN did their homework. But attacking the media is always safe, so that’s what he did. Carson's presentation of strange views and tales in his uniquely calm manner is more disturbing than Trump’s calculated showbiz ranting. He is not the normal political liar at all, and has the unnerving rock-solid assurance of someone for whom personal and unlikely opinions are articles of faith. Trump is a shrewd and calculating manipulator who knows what he can get away with and makes sense in those terms. In Carson we have a man who presents himself as reasonable but who rejects the basic rules of sane dialog for a different and much more dangerous reason. Stop Making Sense was a hit song. Carson is using it as a methodology in his revivalist campaign. It’s the Know Nothing Party born again.

There’s a bottom line here: it’s possible to be overwhelmingly expert in a discipline — playing the violin, applying the calculus, painting portraits — and be a fool about almost everything else.

Carson’s information and judgment on non-medical matters borders on childish. He is by general consent an expert brain surgeon, but that qualifies him as a doctor, and only that. His homey little solutions to real-world problems may not quite be crazy, but letting him be the Republican nominee would be all of that.

How dumb is CIA Director John Brennan? About average for an Obama appointee. The best presidents have a certain fearlessness about hiring smart, dangerous people. Lincoln’s cabinet was not a friendly collection, it was the best people he could find. Stanton, his Secretary of War, a serious political rival. FDR’s appointed Republican Henry Stimson who got things done and could be trusted. Kennedy hired his brother against much advice, and admitted the jealous and hawkish Dean Acheson the inner circle during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also called his bluff and ignored him.

Obama seems to prefer a supportive yes to risky exchanges, and he likes bureaucrats who behave themselves, like Brennan. With the exception of Mrs. Clinton, sponsor of Secretary Nuland and the Ukraine fubar, his cabinet has been politically correct, obedient and mediocre. There have been screw-up’s naturally, like the bargain-basement Canadian-built website for Obamacare. Getting rid of Secretary Sebelius would have sent an important message, but that didn’t happen.

Brennan – whose agency is hugely tech-driven – is another technically challenged bureaucrat living in the last century, qualified on paper to be in charge of the CIA but confused in this one. He’s not just non-tech, he lacks common sense. Trey Gowdy rages at Mrs. Clinton, but there’s no interest in Brennan’s truly mindless use of e-mail.

Brennan also ignored the obvious: any information about him, personal or professional, should be secret. Any spook knows this. Personal information reveals connections, concerns, motives, location, likely events, and when they may happen. Added to other information, it offers a useful picture to our enemies. Why is this man exposing anything at all on blatantly insecure commercial email? My son would say WTF?! with justification. Brennan seems to feel so secure that it doesn’t even occur to him what a juicy target he would be. Secure enough to publicly scold his teen-age hacker.

Lack of self-awareness is the giveaway add-on – a mindless hissy fit when it became known that a high school kid had hacked in his personal account, not once but repeatedly. Repeatedly means that Mr. Brennan has that special ability to deny a problem and move it up from snafu to fubar. As a total non-tech, even I knew something was wrong the second time my email got weird. I also knew that having an outraged hissy-fit would only reveal my limitations, as Brennan revealed his. Running a tech-driven agency where a tech named Ed Snowden revealed countless embarrassing tech facts about US intelligence tech, Brennan doesn’t get it about email. He doesn’t even know enough to have someone close by to make sure he doesn’t step in it.

Who is John Brennan? He came into view with his 2012 claim regarding drones – that US counter-terrorism operations had not resulted in "a single collateral death" because of the "precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop." Walking that back, he then claimed we lacked information about civilian deaths.

“Lying SOB” may be fighting words in your neighborhood bar, but not in Brennan’s world, where they qualify you to move from post to post as an administrator, away from the hands-on worlds of espionage and email. Brennan was once a station chief, but rose to be an intelligence briefer for Bill Clinton, Chief of Staff to CIA Head George Tenet, and director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center which compiled information for President Bush's intelligence briefings.

During this period came a controversy about intelligence he delivered to Bush regarding an Orange Terror Alert in 2003 that served the political end of whipping up paranoia and patriotism and justifying our Iraq invasion. Brennan subsequently left the government, and after a period in the private sector, he emerged as an Obama favorite in various roles: counterterrorism and foreign policy expert, Deputy National Security Advisor, and then CIA director. Despite his acceptance of waterboarding, an Obama no-no.

Brennan’s email gaffe is the shiny tip of an enormous iceberg, and his splenetic public response to this embarrassment tells the rest of the story. The man is out of touch with everything that matters except his career. As with Secretaries Clinton and Sebelius, the last option was admitting he had his head stuck in that notoriously dark place.

Privileged is Privileged. Brennan is a member of the inner circle, and these heads do not roll easily. Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Eisenhower and Kennedy didn’t hire people like this. They weren’t afraid of smart.

​Trey Gowdy looked a little dazed after eleven hours of battle with Mrs. Clinton. She’s a fighter, never quits and rarely clinches. Maybe a little too much. And she has to be happy about this chance do demo her skills, because it diverts attention from other things, like the ongoing presence of Asst. Secretary Victoria Nuland, a protégé of VP Cheney who has somehow stayed on and dominated EU affairs.

What basically did happen on Clinton’s watch as Secretary of State? Short term it was Arab Spring, toppling dictators, hot headlines. Long term it was G.W. Bush downsized, the US interfering in stable, workable situations where there was no threat to the US.The real alphas dogs avoid pointless conflict. FDR bobbed, weaved, and deceived before WW2, avoiding confrontation with isolationists and getting enough supplies to the Brits to hold off Hitler until Pearl Harbor sealed our deal. He was not after headlines, he knew he had to win.When terrorists blew up our Embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon, Ronald Reagan had the prescience and guts to see a no-win, and pulled out. When GHW Bush had a clear path to get rid of Hussein, he left him in place, neutered and with a relatively stable near-east. When President Clinton got us involved in Bosnia it was a horrible mess, but he didn’t go in alone, and in the end, the genocide ended, with its leaders in court. And when he got us involved in Northern Ireland, somehow it worked out against the odds, ending a deadly feud the Brits couldn’t handle on their own.

These patient, quiet victories involved something Mrs. Clinton never seemed to grasp, a sense of where things could go bad. Another thing she failed to grasp was NIMBY. We’ve got the Monroe Doctrine, but in fact all great powers are generally understood to have a special involvement when things get close to home, as with Ukraine and Russia.Mrs. Clinton is a skilled politician with an affinity for convenient alliances that can be dangerous long term. She gave Asst. Secretary Victoria Nuland very free rein in European affairs even after some giveaway phone calls that damaged relations with Germany and Chancellor Merkel’s standing there and revealed chicanery to come in Ukraine. Many would take it as a warning sign that Nuland entered government as a protégé of VP Cheney and is married to an influential dual-citizenship neocon writer. But Clinton and Nuland are cut from the same cloth – powerful women who don’t mind a fight. Nuland repeatedly interfered in Ukraine’s internal affairs over a long period, working with local heroes (Vitaly Klitschko, world champion boxer), the CIA, Greystone (formerly Blackwater) mercenaries, and a cooperative oligarch. She then she installed Hunter Biden as a senior executive in the energy industry and American banker Natalie Jaresko as finance minister. Like those famous phone calls, this was in-your-face stuff. In Putin’s face, actually, and it forced his hand. He reacted much the same way Kennedy did to Khrushchev in Cuba, but without an ocean in the way.

As the smoke clears, we see the results of what Clinton permitted, and it places Benghazi and Congressman Gowdy where they belong, in a sideshow. Benghazi was a classic screw-up followed by a sloppy cover-up. The big show was yet another bloody ethnic civil war, with Ukraine as another Humpty-Dumpty we can’t put back together. But Mrs. Nuland’s actions there had many effects, all damaging to Ukraine, EU, Russia, and now us.As we know from Iraq, ethnic feuds are long lasting, and Ukraine as it existed is gone. But the damage goes much further. Economically injured, Putin acted with dispatch and effect, emerging with greater prestige and no inclination to cooperate with the US, which he had been doing more often than not. Also, EU trade was badly damaged, and its energy supply endangered. Worst of all, Putin emerged very popular at home, and with a new world reputation as a tough, practical leader. He may or may not stabilize Syria, but our puttering in the region has been revealed for what it is.

​Combined with preceding middle east events, Ukraine is part of Mrs. Clinton’s legacy, and Obama’s. If Trey Gowdy’s party wanted to, they could look into this like grown-ups and ask some large pointed questions. They won’t, because, like Mrs. Clinton, they enjoy expensive pointless aggression and the notion of American Exceptionalism uber alles. It’s 20th century thinking, and it was running out of gas even then.

The PBS series on the Roosevelts reminds us that if we don’t have royalty, we do sometimes have a First Family that sticks around. It’s the Clintons in the news lately, but it’s the Bushes with the staying power. Jeb Bush might be the most humane and generally enlightened of his formidable clan, but as a possible president, he brings more than meets the eye. A respected Florida governor, he has executive experience (under BushBama we’ve seen the importance of that), and his Mexican-born wife would be a political asset if his party came to its senses. But the “W” legacy is only the tip of a large disturbing iceberg. The Bush family is as prominent and powerful as the Roosevelts were, and richer, and has produced two modern presidents. But the baggage is staggering.

Researching a thriller set circa the infamous Iran/Contra “arms-for-hostages” deal, I kept coming across W’s father, G.H.W. Bush, or Bush 1, vice president under Ronald Reagan and former head of CIA. That totally illegal deal put Reagan in the White House, and Bush was a power in the CIA that concocted it. Looking into Bush 1 further, I was struck by his bold move to Texas directly on graduating Yale. Texas was new ground for a man with deep New England roots whose father was a Connecticut senator. In the land of the tumbling tumble weed, you could get a fifteen year sentence for twenty grams of that other kind of weed back in the 1950s (Candy Barr, stripper). You might drag a black man to death behind your pickup not long ago, or arrange a hit on just about anyone without worrying much about serious investigation if you were connected. Bush 1 for our purposes, Poppy to his family, was a good fit, moving into the oil business while working with CIA in various roles that conveniently involved prominent oil Arabs. America being a country where history is no longer taught in any serious way, media lemmings have sold the retired “Poppy” as kind of a fun guy, be he in wheelchair or parachute. In fact he is more like the spook terrorist in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, also in a wheelchair, with a gun under his blanket.

How did the Bush dynasty come about? Writing a novel about thoroughbred racing made me aware of the profound respect animal breeders have for bloodlines. Heredity is huge with animals, and whatever else, we are an animal species. The Bushes are no exception and run to type. They have big balls, but that development is fairly recent. Bush 1’s father, Senator Prescott Bush, is often seen as the man who lifted the family from obscurity back in the 1930s, but it was his marriage to the daughter of a brilliant St. Louis banker-businessman, George Herbert Walker, that changed the game. Walker came from a Missouri family, was educated at an English Jesuit school, and had a talent for banking and business that was never evident in the Bush side. In thoroughbred breeding, Bush 1 would be a successful “outcross,” in which two unrelated lines mate, avoiding the perils of inbreeding and creating fresh energy.

Until marrying Dorothy Walker, Prescott Bush was a popular, athletic Yale man known for his confidence, looks, social skills, musical talent, and daring. He was involved in the Skull and Bones theft of Geronimo’s skull, and a standout Whiffenpoof, a founder of the Yale Glee Club. But aside from solid success, nothing remarkable could be expected of him. The family went back to colonial times and had never greatly distinguished itself. Guided by his father in law, Prescott Bush quickly rose to a dominant role in several large banks, and his daring was enhanced. In 1933 he led a failed coup to remove FDR from office. This amazing scheme was outed by Marine Corps General Smedley Butler, who was wanted as a front man for the coup. He did the right thing, and exposed it. A congressional investigation found Butler’s allegations “credible” but he paid whistleblower dues and his career did not prosper.

The public Bushes have been discreet and meticulous over generations, with Bush 2 (“W”) as the exception. They stay out of trouble, even when playing with fire. Prescott Bush’s banks aided Hitler in his rise to power, and continued doing major business with members of the Nazi party into WW2, until FDR ended it in 1942. The Dulles brother's law firm, Sullivan & Cromwell, handled the problem for him, and he emerged unharmed to be elected to the Senate ten years later.

He sired Bush 1, the lovable Poppy, who brought that same crisp bankerly style to his oil/banking/intelligence career. Even as the father was continuing with the Nazis, his son, fresh out of Andover, volunteered for military service and saw action in a torpedo bomber. After the war he attended Yale and followed his father into Skull and Bones, which largely staffed upper levels of the OSS, then CIA, of which Poppy was later head. He remained involved in intelligence most of his life, forming Zapata Oil with a CIA associate, and profitably combining oil, banking and espionage activities. An effective, hard working bureaucrat and vice president, he succeeded Reagan as President despite the Iran-Contra scandal, but was tainted by this totally illegal operation. Only fellow Texan Dan Rather of CBS dared confront him, and Bush 1 blustered his way out of dialog. But his long close involvement with the Bin Laden family and other prominent oil-Muslims, Saudis in particular, was discreet, and remained largely unknown. The string of Iran-Contra pardons that began under Reagan, continued under him for obvious reasons, headed by the former Secretary of Defense, National Security Adviser, CIA Central American Task Force Chief, CIA Deputy Director for Operations, and CIA Counter-Terrorism Chief. Then came the mysterious and convenient death of Amram Nir, prior to Bush 1’s election, not publicized here. Nir was the key Israeli figure in Iran-Contra, and had threatened to publish a warts-and-all version arms-for-hostages.

Equally damning, Bush 1 also played a crucial role forming legendary BCCI (Bank of Credit and Commerce International), working with many Muslims, as documented by Joseph Trento, multiple Pulitzer nominee. (“ . . . with the official blessing of George H.W. Bush as head of the CIA...”) BCCI was probably the dirtiest bank ever, a money laundry for CIA and drug merchants, toppled only after years of international effort. In the process, French investigators discovered Bush 1 had had a personal account with them, and long-term connections with its founders and owners, notably a former head of Saudi intelligence. Filthy as BCCI was, Bush 1 was never called to account.

His son “W”, Bush 2, was less adroit, but somehow became president after failing, first in the oil business (bailed out by Saudi friends) and then as a ball-club owner. Despite this thin record, he was elected Governor of Texas, because he was politically gifted, a cheerleader and social power at Yale. Doonesbury creator Gary Trudeau, who overlapped him at Yale, described him in Rolling Stone as “another sarcastic preppy who gave people nicknames and arranged for keg deliveries.” “W” was head of the Armour Council, to which Trudeau was elected as a freshman “under the mistaken impression it had something to do with student government. In fact, it was the social committee… ”

Trudeau didn’t fully grasp that his social power was a serious political gift. Lacking the Bush work ethic, Bush 2 came off as an easy-going good old boy, and he had a real talent for getting elected. A slow-tracker in a fast-track family, he knew his place and took directions from smarter and more ambitious men, willing to lie about ultimately serious matters and start an oil war. It was hugely profitable for certain corporations, and the war debt was concealed by creative bookkeeping. It also led to an unprecedented collapse of US prestige abroad, with legal and economic consequences we are still living with. Under Bush 2, American prestige dropped below the nadir established in Vietnam. The hysterical legislation following 9/11 removed many civil liberties, while further empowering the already vast Intelligence Community.

This then is some of the family baggage that Jeb Bush brings. And the sad fact is, he may be the pick of the Republican litter in 2016, simply because he is not a fool or a Tea Party enthusiast. He’d probably be superior to Mr. Obama when it comes to cutting a deal, and he might have stopped Mrs. Nuland’s botched Ukraine coup, which ended any Russian cooperation in the near east. But the real question is whether that unrelenting tradition of Bush greed, consistent through banking, oil or the accretion of power, would ever allow him to operate the government in a way that ran against the interest of his class. That would require a great man, and he has not showed signs of greatness. No Bush ever has. Bush 1 was a mediocre president, Bush 2 a disaster.

Both Roosevelts ignored the special interests of their class, FDR to a degree that made him hated by the rich as no other president has ever been. That, as they say, is class. Whether a member of the Bush family can even imagine aspiring to this kind of selfless dedication is the question. FDR never lost the trust of the people, and it’s been a while since any American politician has accomplished that more than briefly.

Stanley Crouch writes like one of those big pre-emissions V-8s they used to build in Detroit with multiple mammoth carburetors, minimal gas mileage, and no tomorrow if you held the gas pedal down. On American roads they’d obliterate cute little hottie sports cars, and that’s what Crouch has done to jazz writing with Kansas City Lightning, his biography of the legendary Charlie Parker, who personified jazz during that wild WW2 period when be-bop sprang forth to confound the music world.

Parker, a.k.a. Bird, is an unnerving figure, profoundly talented and intelligent. He climbed as far and as fast in every way as could be done in thirty five years, the quintessential boy from the provinces. He was the bomb. From being thrown off the bandstand in his teens, he became the greatest horn man of his time, and he did it on the very unforgiving alto saxophone. From an obscure ghetto childhood in Kansas City he became a favorite of Nica de Koenigswarter, another legend, a Rothschild who was the patron of all time. Every jazz fan knows the melodrama of Bird’s death while watching TV in the apartment of the Baroness Nica, and instead of that, Crouch gives us his brief, brilliant, fated life: when he died, his work was truly done. People were scrawling Bird Lives! on walls for years afterward, and he did that – no reedman has ever been so influential, dominating, loved and imitated. Everyone wanted to play like Bird, and no one could. I spent years trying.

Jazz books, be they fact or fiction, tend to be on the thin side. Young Man With A Horn does embody some essence of the twenties, but it’s a white book, and jazz is a black music. No matter that Bix Beiderbecke was the Keats of jazz cornet, it was his good friend Louis Armstrong who was the virtuoso, doing impossible things night after night, decade after decade. Bird dominated the same way, picking up where Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins left off, playing with unheard of velocity, sophistication and pure beauty, fusing blues and those nifty mostly Jewish tunes from musicals into something strange and new, and incomprehensible to those for whom Benny Goodman’s Carnegie Hall Concert was the crowning achievement of jazz music. Bird and bop announced something as shattering to its world as abstract expressionism was to painting.

Crouch delves into Bird’s tortured self and meteoric life, bringing it to the reader as only great biographers can do. Gone is the contentious intellectual of earlier books, debates and forums, and the columnist for the Daily News. The novelist of Don’t The Moon Look Lonesome comes forth, twinned with a tireless, hypnotic researcher who hunkers down in Parker’s home town and tracks down the people around him in childhood and youth. And gets them to tell all. Crouch can be a tedious explainer, but he is so in love with the truth about his subject that this inclination is simply burned away.

Within a few paragraphs, Crouch conveys the feel of the thirties as experienced in wide-open Kansas City, where there was no Great Depression for jazz musicians. There were many bands, epic parties, and fierce proud competition. Kansas City was corrupt under Boss Pendergast, but it was a “boomtown for jazz, with mother lodes of style and gushers of swing.” It was a red-hot creative crucible, as New Orleans and Chicago had been before, with musicians living for the music and finding themselves as artists in the heat of the jams and the chilly woodsheds where they practiced. Bands battled, great rooms full of people danced, and Jay McShann had the boss band. In it was the skinny 21 year old Parker with his soaring, searing alto, about to reinvent the music. Only a musician can fully appreciate the taste and texture of that, and Crouch was one himself back before he became an American oracle – a jazz drummer on the New York scene of the sixties and seventies, later booking bands into the Tin Palace and making it a cultural nexus.

He captures Parker’s charm in talking a cop out of a ticket in Central Park as McShann’s battered band arrives New York on its way to the Woodside Hotel, immortalized in Count Basie’s Jumpin at the Woodside. In hardly any words at all he creates Harlem for us, a Harlem no less vivid than that of Chester Himes. Then he captures the junk-sick chill when Bird immediately leaves the hotel, a chill that haunted Parker almost all his life and created a generation of junky musicians who thought that was his secret.

Here and throughout, the book is a fascinating picture of the jazz life, of musicians eating and joking and hanging out, an uber-family in which Parker was both a legend and a notorious moneyless addict. The rich texture and detailing are amazing. Why were there two bandstands at the Savoy ballroom? So bands could battle without the distraction of one band leaving the stand and another setting up. Who went to the Savoy? Lana Turner, Greta Garbo, and, and, and… Did black real estate agent Charlie Buchanan own the Savoy ballroom where McShann would wipe out the Lucky Millinder band? Not really – it was two Jewish brothers re-named Gale. Does it matter? Definitely, because the music business and the music itself involves this ethnic relationship. The tens of thousands of black musicians schooling themselves on I Got Rhythm chords were studying George Gershwyn. Louis Armstrong’s career was crucially expedited and sustained by a Jewish manager who saved hin from the mob. Rich, relevant detail is a Crouch gift. Only academics dream of researching as he did, and this book is anything but academic. It leaps off the page.

How did Bird come to be? Who was he? Crouch infiltrates Kansas City as only a New York hustler on a mission could do. He goes back into the family bloodlines (totally hybridized, American style). He looks into the grandparents, and dwells a moment on Parker’s handsome, charming, hard-drinking hell-raising dad. And his mother, his all-important mother, who eventually gave up on his dad and put everything into her son, whose innocent promise is written into the shy, hopeful photograph that opens the book. He notes his Roman Catholic schooling, notoriously the best and most disciplined generally available, and details his upbringing as a kind of young prince, dressed to the nines, never allowed to take a part time job. But he also quotes people close to the family who felt there was no love at the core of her devotion. He delves deep into those childhood friends and neighbors, and how the neighborhood operated, and tells about his very serious relationship with first wife, with whom he was in love from boyhood, and about his very different half-white brother. It’s like Mark Twain on life in Hannibal, Missouri – pure America without much money to corrupt it.

There is very little Crouch failed to uncover about the nascent Bird, including his love of Sherlock Holmes (who was devoted to injecting cocaine), or about the grown man who who could never kick his habit for long. We see him in flush times, and we see him learning to hop a train, showing up in Chicago broke with no horn, half-starved, in funky old clothes. We see his chameleon ability to fit in anywhere very quickly through his gift for mimicry. And we see his inescapable genius as it evolved through intense creative relationships with musicians long forgotten. No one I ever met heard of Biddy Fleet, but Crouch did, and tells us how they shared an extended exploration of difficult tunes that other players avoided – which leads to his legendary breakthrough with Cherokee, a tricky tune that fascinated him and liberated him.

Crouch shows us a man changing his world as surely as Van Gogh in Arles or Beethoven in Vienna. We see him up close, and what he went through to do it. Kansas City Lightning is biography of the highest level, written about a musician, by a musician who also happens to be a very powerful writer. It’s also loaded with pungent history of all kinds. American history that jumps off the page and grabs you.